


Awake

by bedwyrssong



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Angst, Bullying, Childhood, Coming of Age, First Kiss, Gen, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Self-Discovery, Underage Kissing, but nothing more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 04:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2609426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedwyrssong/pseuds/bedwyrssong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Thomas Barrow childhood fic. At a young age, he is already being pushed around because he's different, trapped in a life he wants no part of. When a young girl at his school takes a shine to him, one of his bullies grows desperate. But it is not for the reason Thomas suspects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awake

At some point between the time they leave the nursery and their entrance into adulthood, children discover that they are not all alike, that not every squealing laugh, dimpled hand, or round face is interchangeable. They begin to distinguish between friend and foe, and from a tender age Thomas Barrow found himself most often placed on the side of the foes.

He was  _different_. There was no other way to put it. He didn’t know exactly why he was different, and the boys and girls who bullied him never said, rational discussion not being a hallmark of the schoolyard. Perhaps it was because he was dreamier than most boys his age, very much alive to the beauty of things, or because he was less clumsy, all his movements deft and precise, like his father’s when he was at work on his clocks. Or maybe it was simply because he possessed a severe beauty one does not expect to find in a child.

He began his education at a school just down the road from his father’s shop, but there it was not only the other children who set him aside for ridicule. The schoolmaster clearly didn’t like him either, calling upon him to answer questions far beyond the scope of his knowledge, and rewarding the boys who picked on him. Phyllis, his older sister’s friend, noticed this and told his parents of it. The school on the other side of town was run by a sweet, mild young lady, she told them; maybe Thomas would fare better there?

Soon he found himself waking at dawn every morning, putting on his most sturdy pair of shoes, and walking across town to the school where farmers’ sons and daughters from the outlying villages learned their sums and alphabets.

Miss Brandon was very kind to him, and when she called upon him to recite a verse or do a sum, it was always to challenge him, to show him what was within his grasp, not to make him look a fool. She recognized a certain ambition and curiosity in him and fostered it. But though she did nothing to encourage the farmers’ boys when they began tormenting him as the merchants’ boys had before them, she was too mild-mannered to be effective in curbing them. And while Thomas had fewer persecutors here, the fact that they were not his neighbors, that they lived a different sort of life, made him more of an outsider than ever.

So, over the next few years, he withdrew into himself, hiding the parts of himself that others might consider “soft” or “weak.” He held his head high and answered insults with steady glares. As he began to learn the sports that were popular among the youth of the day, and to excel at them, particularly cricket, the bullying became less and less pronounced, and certainly less physical in nature. He was someone to be reckoned with, yet beneath the modicum of respect he’d earned, he was sure everyone must know that he was a sham, and just as soft and  _different_ at his core. Those who kept up the bullying he considered sworn enemies from that day forward, and he began incorporating elaborate revenge fantasies into the make-believe worlds he created in his head.

On his walk home one day he scaled a wall and stole an apple from an orchard. To his disappointment he found that it was rotten, and tasted very much the way his life felt, bitter and ugly.

One morning he slipped a copy of  _Grimm’s Fairy Tales_  that he’d found hidden in a dusty corner of the shop into his knapsack and left the house even earlier than usual. When he arrived at the school, there was nobody there except for Miss Brandon, who gave him a pleasant smile as he sat down at his desk. He pulled the book out and pored over the pages, losing himself in a world where even a tailor could slay giants, where maidens trapped in their lonely towers as securely as he was trapped in his life were rescued by dashing princes, and where a different sort of wonder waited around each corner.

"Tryin’ to become more of a girl than you are already, Barrow?"

Thomas’s head snapped up. The schoolroom was half-full now; behind him and on either side he could hear the other children settling into their seats. And before him, wearing an especially nasty look, stood Jacob Mullan.

He was among the most persistent of his bullies, a sheep-farmer’s son, solidly built, with a thatch of sandy brown hair and such high coloring that his cheeks showed red under his tan with even the slightest provocation. Thomas often found himself watching him out of the corner of his eyes, for reasons he could not explain, and he liked to imagine wrestling him down into the mud—a visceral, bestial sort of punishment that usually did not enter into his revenge fantasies.

Jacob jabbed a dirty finger at Thomas’s book, pointing to the illustration of Snow White’s mother as she sat sewing by her window. The needle pricked the queen’s finger and a drop of blood had fallen on the snow-covered ebony window. She was so struck by the contrast, Thomas read, that she wished her unborn child might be so colored, red and white and black.

"Is that how  _your_  mum ended up with something as unsightly as you?” Jacob asked. He surveyed Thomas analytically. “Hair black as ebony. Skin white as snow. Hell, if you painted yourself like a whore, you’d even have the lips red as blood.”

Thomas started to rise. He wanted to have it out then and there, even if it meant being thrown out of the schoolhouse, but a hand gripped his arm, holding him back.

"Stop being so horrid, Jacob," Annabelle Keats said—the quiet, curly-haired girl who had sat behind Thomas for most of the year, but with whom he had scarcely exchanged a word until now.

Jacob glared at them both.

The silence was broken by Miss Brandon’s ringing of the bell. “Everyone in you seats, please,” she keened cheerily.

Annabelle let go of Thomas’s arm. He settled back into his chair as Jacob turned to find his desk.

Thomas’s grammar book was worn and stained.  He remembered there were several blank pages at the back, so he tore a corner off, wrote  _Thanks for bein so kind to me_ , and handed it back to Annabelle. She looked up with a face as bright as the month of May, and with a sudden sense that he had somehow done something wrong, Thomas turned back to his work.

The next morning Annabelle arrived carrying a bunch of larkspur that she said grew in the woods near her house.

"They’re for you, Thomas," she announced with a broad smile, her eyes reflecting the blueness of the flowers.

He stared down at them for a moment then said, in a hush, “Thank you. They’re lovely.” He felt so awkward that he was surprised how smooth his voice sounded; to her, he probably seemed overly polite, stiff even, when in fact he had no idea what to do with himself.

He quickly opened his desk and shoved the flowers inside, but as he lowered it back down he noticed Jacob Mullan glaring at him, probably jealous that he, Thomas Barrow, the outsider, the softie, had drawn the notice of the prettiest girl in the school.

Thomas didn’t know whether to feel smug or scared.

When he got up at the end of the day to leave, he found Annabelle waiting beside his desk with a shy blush. So he tucked his books under his arm and walked her to the door, holding her bunch of flowers low, so as not to attract notice.

As soon as he stepped into the yard, though, a pair of rough brown hands wrenched them from his grasp. Jacob tossed the larkspur on the ground, splattering them with mud, then began to grind the petals under his heel.

"So you’ve charmed our little Annabelle here, have you, Barrow? Thought you’d steal her away from us maybe, take her across town to your shops and taverns and people who think they’re better than us? Or maybe you just thought you’d look less puny with a girl on your arm?" He leaned in so that their foreheads were almost touching. "You goin’ to cry, princess?"

Thomas set his jaw. “I’ll never cry for you again.” He had, once or twice, when he’d first come to the school, but now the only tears he ever shed were in the solitude of his bed, and he meant to keep it that way.

But Annabelle was weeping her own tears as she stared down at the trampled flowers. He reached out and took her hand, and she smiled, happy as all humans are to have a companion in their misery.

Yet that was only the beginning.

For the next week both he and Annabelle had their lunches stolen, spiders and snakes hidden inside their desks, and insults hurled at them every time they entered the schoolyard. Annabelle’s response to this was to cleave ever more tightly to Thomas, which he suspected would only serve to encourage these onslaughts.

"Annabelle," he said to her at the end of the week, when she insisted on walking with him part of his way home, "I think it might be best for both of us if we stopped talking to each other at school, and maybe I should ask Miss Brandon if I can change desks. I think Jacob and his friends will leave us alone then, more or less.”

She stopped by a low stone wall, just where the road was overhung with trees. “D-don’t you like me, Thomas?”

“What’s not to like?”

“And you think I’m pretty?”

 _Like one of the princesses in my book_ , he thought. “’Course. Everyone does.”

“But you don’t want to be sweethearts?”

He looked at her steadily, took a deep breath, and said, “No.”

She broke away from him then, turned and began trudging back to the farm. Thomas was sure she began crying as soon as she was out of earshot. He watched her walking away for a moment, then turned and studied the wall. Graying apple boughs peaked over the top; it was the same wall that Thomas had climbed once and come back over with fruit that turned out to be rotten. At last he turned his face homewards and continued thoughtfully on his way, saying nothing to his mother when she complained of his tardiness.

On Monday, at his request, Miss Brandon placed him at a seat by the window, far away from Annabelle. When he turned to glance at her during the lesson on the kings of England, she stiffened, and would not look back at him. At noon, when they all went out to the schoolyard, she brushed past him to join a small knot of girls sitting by the fence, and Thomas realized that he had lost the first and only friend he had made there.

Feeling more alone than ever, he took his lunch pail and went around to the back of the schoolhouse. He sat down in the dirt and leaned against the red brick wall, staring out at the fields as he ate his meagre meal.

The sound of a footfall nearly made him drop his sandwich. He started to his feet and made two fists as he turned to face Jacob.

“Hidin’ from me, were you, Barrow?”

“Tryin’ to find some air that wasn’t polluted with the smell of sheep dung,” Thomas said. He figured he might as well answer the larger boy’s insolence as well as his fists.

Jacob glanced at Thomas’s hands. “Did you think I came back here for fisticuffs?”

“I don’t know what you came here for,” Thomas said, “but I’m done being your victim. I’ve broken off with Annabelle, so you have no cause to bully her anymore. But I doubted that would be enough for you to leave me alone. From now on, I fight back.”

With a quirk of his eyebrows, Jacob dug his feet into the ground, then lunged at Thomas. Thomas managed a right hook to his jaw, but it didn’t have the force he thought it would. As his fist glanced off the other boy’s cheek, Jacob grasped his wrist and pinned it to the side of the schoolhouse. Then he stilled Thomas’s flailing left arm and did the same with it. Now the boy found himself immobilized, with his fiercest enemy only inches away.

He fixed Jacob with the darkest, evilest look he had ever given another human being, and tilted his chin up defiantly, refusing to flinch as he waited for the next blow or insult.

Jacob Mullan leaned forward and planted his lips on Thomas’s.

 _A kiss._ Jacob was kissing him. Thomas recognized what it was as much from the Brothers Grimm as from real life; his parents never kissed in front of him. But everything within him, the blood beating at his temples, the lightness in his chest was telling him that yes, this, this was it, this was everything he had read and dreamed of. No wonder Sleeping Beauty and Snow White had wakened from their enchanted slumbers. A kiss, he decided as his lips began to move in response to Jacob’s, was something so passionate, so magical, one could not help but come alive to it.

After a moment Jacob broke away, stepped back, and cast his eyes down, away from Thomas.

“Y-you … you _kissed_ me,” Thomas said, panting against the wall.

“Yes.” Jacob kicked at the dirt, his cheeks redder than ever.

“But you hate me!”

“Not as much as I’d like,” the other boy said.          

He gave Thomas a sad look before disappearing back around the schoolhouse.

And, with startling clarity, Thomas finally understood. He understood why Jacob was so angered by Annabelle’s present of the flowers—not because he was jealous over Annabelle, but because he was jealous over  _Thomas_. And, more importantly, he finally understood _why_ he was different. He would not be sweethearts with the belle of the neighborhood, but he _would_ allow himself to be kissed by a boy he thought he hated, and crave to be kissed by him again. Yet he was not the only person in the world who was different in that way. Jacob was too.

Over the next few months they shared more secret kisses behind the schoolhouse, but with each meeting Jacob became more and more shy about them, while Thomas grew increasingly fervent, gathering strength from the certainty that this was who he was.

Then, one day, Jacob called him a sod in front of the entire school.

Thomas spat at him. He had never heard the word before, but from his tone, he knew exactly what he meant.

He never took his lunch to the back of the schoolhouse again.

So Jacob was not to be his Prince Charming. Thomas was not surprised. He hadn’t expected him to be, really, not even after that first surprising kiss; he could not so easily forget his blows and insults. Jacob would not rescue him from the tower he was trapped in, and his kisses had not dislodged the rotten apple that was his life. But Thomas Barrow was alive, awake, and keening to explore a world where wonders waited around each corner.

He knew that in order to get there, he would have to rescue himself.

So, when he turned twelve and his father wanted him to become apprenticed as a clockmaker, he instead followed a suggestion from Phyllis Baxter, and went to work as a hallboy at a great house in Yorkshire.

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize if my hitting all of you over the head with the Snow White imagery caused brain damage. It was not my intent.
> 
> [I'm also on Tumblr!](http://bedwyrssong.tumblr.com/)


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